In the beginning, there was no such thing as a pinch-hitting specialist. Indeed, in the first few decades of major league baseball, the tactic of pinch-hitting was extremely rare. Standard procedure was, barring injury, that the players who started the game, finished the game. To a great extent this applied even to pitchers. As the 19th century turned to the 20th, pitchers were still completing close to 90% of their starts. Pinch hitting was thus something that simply didn’t happen very often, so the notion of deploying a player on the roster to be a pinch-hitting specialist was unheard of.

But in the first decade of the 1900s, pitching staff usage patterns began to change. Despite the fact that it was an extremely low-scoring period&dash;vastly lower-scoring than the 1890s—complete-game rates declined. Eighty-six percent of major league starts were completed in 1901, but by 1909 that figure had dropped by nearly a quarter down to 65%. Many new opportunities were being created for pinch hitters to be deployed.

Let’s define a pinch-hitting specialist as a player who appears in at least 40 games in a season and at least 80% of his appearances are strictly as a pinch-hitter and not as a pinch-runner or as a defensive player at any position. By that definition, in 1909, the first pinch-hitting specialist in history appeared. Pittsburgh Pirates manager Fred Clarke deployed Ham Hyatt, a 24-year-old left-handed-batting rookie, in 49 games, and over 40 of those appearances were as a pinch hitter. Hyatt performed very well in the novel pattern; he hit for average (.299) with good power (three doubles and four triples in 67 at-bats), amassing an OPS+ of 137.

The Pirates, who hadn’t won the National League pennant since 1903, ran away with it in 1909, winning a franchise-record 110 games. Obviously Hyatt’s contribution to that championship effort was minor, but neither was it insignificant. Clarke kept Hyatt on hand for the next several years and continued to use him as a pinch-hitting specialist to some degree. Others took notice.

The 1910s

Though the rate wasn’t as rapid as it had been in the 1900-09 period, complete games continued to decline in the next decade. Sixty-two percent of starts were completed in 1910, and the rate would be that high only once again in the next 10 years, and it was generally in the range of about 55%. Thus with nearly half of games going to the bullpen, and with left-right platooning going on more than ever, more pinch-hitting was occurring than ever before.

Fred Clarke used Hyatt as a strict pinch-hitting specialist in both 1913 and 1914, but he was no longer the only one. In 1912, the Giants’ John McGraw deployed Moose McCormick, a 31-year-old left-handed-hitting journeyman outfielder, in the pinch-hitting specialist mode. (In 1914, McGraw also used 36-year-old veteran Mike Donlin as an extreme pinch-hitting specialist, though he didn’t quite meet our 40-game minimum: 35 games, entirely as a pinch-hitter, without a single inning played in the field.)

Over the decade, five National Leaguers, three American Leaguers and one Federal Leaguer in the two seasons that league operated appeared as 40-plus-game pinch-hitting specialists. Overall this group hit extremely well, including a sensational year by Hyatt in 1913; his 181 OPS+ remains the highest mark by any pinch-hitting specialist to this day.

Six of the nine were left-handed batters. They were 28 years old on average, largely a group of players with little or no experience as major league regulars.

The 1920s

Scoring boomed in this decade, and beleaguered pitchers completed fewer starts than ever: from 57% in 1920, down to 48% by 1929. Yet the incidence of pinch-hitting specialists was actually slightly down from the previous decade.

But there was one new development. For the first time, former stars were now deployed as pinch-hitting specialists in the final phase of their careers: Gavy Cravath, Amos Strunk and Cy Williams. Cravath’s deployment was interesting in that as a playing manager for the Phillies in 1920, he was the first manager to use himself as a pinch-hitting specialist.

John McGraw was the one manager in the decade who deployed more than one pinch-hitting specialist, using former home run champ Dave Robertson in the role in 1922 and rookie Pat Crawford in 1929.

Aside from Cravath, all of the pinch-hitting specialists of the 1920s were left-handed batters. The few managers who made use of this role were pretty uniformly angling for the platoon advantage against what were primarily right-handed pitching staffs.

The 1930s

Scoring levels, as we exploredhere, were quite different between the two leagues in this decade. Nevertheless, complete game rates were quite consistent between the leagues, and they remained rather constant across the decade in the middle-40 percent range.

But despite the fact that more pitchers were removed from games than ever before, teams were deploying pinch-hitting specialists slightly less frequently than in the 1920s, the second straight decade of slight decline in the practice. Moreover, just two cases occurred following 1933. It appeared that the pinch-hitting specialist might be headed toward extinction.

This isn’t exactly an all-star lineup. Unlike the 1920s, none of the career-closing sluggers of the 1930s were deployed as pinch-hitting specialists. Though it would have been interesting to see a great professional hitter such as Harry Heilmann, Lefty O’Doul, Rogers Hornsby (well, actually he was, but very briefly), or, for that matter, Babe Ruth, deployed as a pure pinch-hitting specialist at the end of his career, for whatever reason it didn’t happen in the 1930s. It was a decade in which platooning greatly declined as well, as it was generally an era in which specialized roles and active in-game management recessed.

But John McGraw went to the end as a fancier of the pinch-hitting specialist, deploying the rookie Sam Leslie that way in 1931, and upon his health-dictated retirement in 1932, handing Leslie off to successor Bill Terry.

The 1940s

The pinch-hitting specialist forged a bit of a comeback. The decade’s decline in complete games was slight: 44% in 1940 to 39% in 1949, and the resurgence of the pinch-hitting specialist was similarly subtle but certain. In the decade’s early years, a couple of aging superstars, Charlie Gehringer and Joe Cronin (managing himself), were deployed this way for the first time in a long while. Cronin indeed had an utterly brilliant season in the role in 1943. And in the latter years of the decade, several younger talents were so disposed.

Perhaps the most interesting were a couple of erstwhile catchers. Joe Schultz (yes, thatJoe Schultz, the 1969 Seattle Pilots manager, of pound-that-Budweiser fame), had essentially an entire major league career as a pinch-hitting specialist. (His best year, 1946, when he hit .386 in 57 at-bats, barely misses the conditions to be included here.) And Smoky Burgess was a 22-year-old rookie pinch-hitting specialist, with a long and remarkable career ahead of him.

Nine of the 11 1940s pinch-hitting specialists batted left-handed; the heavy reliance on platoon advantage in this role continued. The overall performance of these specialists wasn’t as impressive of those of earlier decades, as indicated by the weighted average OPS+ of 82. Bear in mind, however, that while an OPS+ of 82 is significantly less than league-wide average, it remains vastly better than the offensive performance of the batters for whom these specialists were generally pinch hitting. Weak-hitting middle infielders and catchers often have OPS+ figures in the range of around 60, and pitchers are typically quite a bit below that, often below zero.

The 1950s

Otherwise known as “the blossoming.”

Complete game rates dropped dramatically, more than any decade since the 1900s, from 40% in 1950 to 30% in 1959, a neat, clean one-quarter. Accompanied by a huge resurgence in platooning practices, the opportunity for pinch-hitting specialists was better than ever before, and managers met it like never before.

A long list of interesting stories here. Keller, Mize and Vernon were former stars, going not quietly into the darkness. Crowe was a formidable enough hitter to be a pinch-hitting specialist both before and after his major league regular phase; undoubtedly he would have been a long-time major league star but for Jim Crow.

Dale Mitchell was a good hitter for several years before becoming a pinch-hitting specialist. What’s notable about him in this regard is not just that he was pinch-hitting when called out on strikes to end Don Larsen’s1956 World Series perfect game in his next-to-last professional at-bat, and not just that the irony of that was that Mitchell had spent his career avoiding the strikeout to an astounding degree, but that by the time that at-bat occurred, Mitchell had been a miserable on-base hitter for two full seasons. Among the pinch hitters Dodgers manager Walt Alston might have called upon to attempt to break up a perfect game at the last extremity—that is, get on base—Mitchell was a questionable choice.

Northey had never been a particular star, but he was an excellent platoon hitter for quite a while before disappearing into minor league oblivion for no apparent reason. He then impressively reappeared in his mid-30s as a pinch-hitting specialist with the White Sox; Northey’s 1956 performance in that role at age 36 was among the very best ever recorded.

The 1960s

Scoring declined, and this had an effect of slowing the decline in the percentage of complete games, which stabilized in the mid-to-high 20s. Still, factoring in expansion, the frequency of deployment of pinch-hitting specialists actually declined a bit from the peak of the 1950s, though it was still higher than any time prior to that.

Every pinch-hitting specialist of the 1960s batted left-handed, with the exception of the line-drive-hitting Bob Johnson in 1969.

No major former stars were represented in this crew, but it’s a long list of really-good-for-a-long-time hitters, many of whom had stood out as platoon hitters: Valo, Torgeson, Wertz, Skinner and Covington.

Jerry Lynch had been an exceptionally good pinch hitter through the late ’50s and early ’60s, but he had never really been a specialist in the role; he was more of a semi-regular who pinch hit a lot. Not until the very end of his career was he really focused as a pinch hitter.

And we meet again our rotund line-drive-machine friend Smoky Burgess, who had come into the majors in the late 1940s as a pinch-hitting specialist and went out in the mid-to-late 1960s in the same role. In the many meantime years, he had been deployed much in the manner of Lynch: a great pinch hitter, but starting quite a lot as well.

The 1970s

With the adoption of the designated hitter rule in the American League in 1973, use of pinch-hitting specialists in that league dramatically declined. A DH is, of course, a full-time pinch-hitting specialist, in some sense. But the crucial distinction is the manner in which the DH rule allows the pinch hitter to remain in the lineup without appearing defensively. With the DH, the often-tricky decision of to pinch hit or not, or exactly when to deploy the weapon of the pinch-hitting specialist, is largely removed from the manager’s set of problems. (This is the primary reason I’ve never preferred the DH; it dumbs down the manager’s challenge.)

Deployment of pinch-hitting specialists in the National League continued apace, as the decline in complete games persisted: from 24% of NL games in 1970 to 19% by 1979. A higher proportion than ever before of pinch-hitting specialists were right-handed batters, but a great deal of that is simply the influence of Manny Mota—see below.

Gates Brown was the lone American Leaguer still deployed as a pinch-hitting specialist past 1973. Brown had, of course, been famed for his pinch-hitting prowess since the mid-1960s, but the Tigers had always given him at least the occasional start in left field (just to keep his swing sharp for pinch hitting, I suspect). Brown would appear to have been a guy for whom the DH rule was expressly designed, but he had a lackluster year when used as a more or less full-time DH in 1973. (It is the case that The Gator was 34 by then, and shall we say, not getting any slimmer.) So in 1974, the Tigers installed Al Kaline as their regular DH, and in 1975 the DH job was given to Willie Horton. Brown was, for the first time in his career, deployed as a true pinch-hitting specialist, batting for the Tigers’ light–hittingmiddleinfielders in crucial late-inning situations.

Manny Mota was another pinch-hitting legend, deployed by the Dodgers as an extreme pinch-hitting specialist through much of the decade of the 1970s. Unlike the vast majority of these guys, Mota was a right-handed batter, but it didn’t make any difference to Mota who was pitching; he was going to hit a line drive anyway. As a Giants fan, I can attest that in the late innings of a tight game against the Dodgers, the presence of Mota looming in the L.A. dugout was frightening indeed. Mota was constitutionally incapable of doing anything other than smacking a solid line drive in any at-bat against any pitcher in any circumstance. Mota turns 68 years old this month, but I suspect if you go to Mota’s house tonight at 3 AM, yank him out of bed, jam a bat in his hands and have a fully-warmed up Mariano Rivera in the front yard flinging his nastiest cutter, the groggy, barefoot pajama-clad Mota will stumble out there and drill the first wicked offering for a solid line drive. In the dark. (Smash! There goes the neighbor’s living room window.)

The 1980s

The Tony LaRussa-managed 1981 White Sox deployed Bobby Molinaro as a pinch-hitting specialist, the last time any American League team has used one. The tactic became a nearly exclusively National League phenomenon, but with NL complete games dropping to ever-lower levels (from 16% in 1980 to 11% in 1989), National League managers used pinch-hitting specialists at the highest rate ever seen.

Six of the 27 pinch-hitting specialists of the 1980s were right-handed batters, a higher proportion than most previous decades.

The best pinch-hitting specialist of this era was clearly Rusty Staub, who capped off his long career with a sequence of very strong performances for the Mets.

The 1990s

Complete-game rates continued to plummet in the National League, from 10% in 1990 to just 5% by 1999. Yet the deployment of pinch-hitting specialists declined dramatically, to a frequency not seen since the 1940s. The explanation is clearly found in the makeup of rosters: across the decade, bullpens grew in size, at the expense of bats on the bench. As we exploredindepthpreviously, the 1990s saw unprecedented use of LOOGYs, closers and other short-stint relief pitching patterns, strategies which soak up roster space, inhibiting the capacity of teams to keep pure pinch-hitters on hand.

Two specialists on this list produced seasons among the most impressive of all time: Gerald Perry in 1993 and John Vander Wal in 1995 were both brilliant in the role. However, both turned in dreadful performances just a couple of years later, indicating just how difficult the pinch-hitting specialist job is.

The 2000s

Through the first half of this decade, the complete game has continued to edge ever closer to near-full extinction, yet the deployment of pinch-hitting specialists has also declined further. Teams continue to opt for extreme relief pitching specialists over extreme offensive specialists.

Jack McKeon of the Florida Marlins has been the only manager in this decade to use more than one pinch-hitting specialist, deploying the veteran Lenny Harris in the mode in both 2004 and 2005. Harris performed terribly in ’04, and excellently in ’05, again illustrating the elusive nature of dependable and predictable performance in this very narrow usage pattern.

What’s to Come?

As we see below, the usage of pinch-hitting specialists is on the wane:

The Designated Hitter pretty thoroughly killed the role in the American League, and from a height of deployment in the 1980s, usage of it in the National League is lower than it’s been in half a century.

The wisdom of deploying a player in this manner has always been questionable. Pinch hitting is an extremely challenging assignment under the best of conditions, and virtually never getting a chance to get more than one at-bat in any game all season long can hardly be seen as the best of conditions. It would seem wise, even if a player is really limited defensively, to give him at least an occasional start, a chance to get three of four at-bats in a single game at least once a week, to keep his timing sharp. The generally modest performance of pinch-hitting specialists over the decades, and the wild fluctuations in performance among even the best of them, are strong indicators of the difficulty of doing well in the role. I would argue that, as a rule of thumb, each player on the bench should be able to potentially contribute in more than one way, and limiting a player to even the chance to contribute in only one way — and the most challenging way at that — doesn’t seem the wisest use of a precious roster spot.

That said, I remain skeptical that the roles that have largely replaced pinch-hitting specialists—LOOGYs and other very short-stint relief pitchers—represent a much better contribution of value. If a roster spot should ideally contribute in more than one way, short-relief specialists are by definition incapable of meeting even that requirement, offering zero offensive capacity, nor any even as a defensive innings-eater. In short, I suspect the replacement of pinch-hitting specialists with short-relief specialists swaps one generally suboptimized roster spot for another.

The type of player who can predictably excel in the pinch-hitting specialist usage pattern—the graybearded Rusty Staub, Manny Mota, or Smoky Burgess—has always been extremely rare. Absent such a precious jewel, it’s doubtful that many of the decisions to deploy players as pinch-hitting specialists have been particularly wise.

Steve Treder has been a co-author of every Hardball Times Annual publication since its inception in 2004. His work has also been featured in Nine, The National Pastime, and other publications. He has frequently been a presenter at baseball forums such as the SABR National Convention, the Nine Spring Training Conference, and the Cooperstown Symposium. When Steve grows up, he hopes to play center field for the San Francisco Giants.